Author event with Chris Cander author of The Weight of a Piano

Parnassus Books is thrilled to welcome Chris Cander author of The Weight of a Piano.

The Weight of a Piano tells the story of two women and the piano that inexorably ties

their lives together through time and across continents, for better and for worse. In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano. In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and has to move to a new apartment. During the move, her hand is crushed by the Blüthner piano that her father gave to her as a gift for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a fire that burned their house down. The piano has always been a constant in her life, but frustrated by her injury, she decides to sell it. An intriguing buyer emerges, who slowly begins to reveal the mysterious and tragic connections between Clara and Katya. The result is a powerful exploration of the emotional (and physical) baggage that we carry and what happens when we start to let them go.

Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-inresidence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel, 11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, and her most recent, Whisper Hollow, was long-listed for the Great Santini Fiction Prize by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She is also the author of The Word Burglar, which won the 2014 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award (silver).